The Jack Benny Show in the 1940s Website

ABOUT THE "JACK BENNY IN THE 1940S" WEBSITE:

I hope that this website has been a useful and entertaining resource for all of those who have visited since I started it (way) back in October 2008. New pages and information are being updated as I (slowly) transfer all of the research that I had originally done back in 1989/1990, combined with the more recent research that I’ve done in the last two years. I apologize for the delays in getting everything up…my job (fastener and rivet sales), and my 6-1/2 year old daughter Emily Elizabeth, and now my new 4-month old daughter Riley Grace, seem to take up a lion’s share of my time! But more pages and updates are coming soon. Some of the things recently (and semi-recently) added include:

*More detailed descriptions for the 1939-1940 season

*A chronology of Jack Benny Day-By-Day from 1940 to 1949 (continually being updated)

*A look at the program's relationship with the post-1944 sponsor the American Tobacco Company, makers of Lucky Strikes cigarettes

*A page listing all of the songs sung on the program 1940-1949 by Dennis Day and Larry Stevens

*A section with information on the Jack Benny program in the 1930s, including episode logs

Still to come:

*More detailed descriptions for the shows in the episode logs, including transcribing Don Wilson's introductions, and more descriptions for the 1948-1949 and 1949-1950 seasons

*A page with a listing of all of the holiday themed episodes

*Completing the information on the rest of the Jack Benny show writers on "The Writers 1940-1949" page

*A history of the program's relationship with Jell-O

As noted above, I had originally done my research on the Jack Benny radio program back in 1989/1990. I had known the name of Jack Benny, of course, and had even seen an episode of his classic television show here and there....but I had become majorly interested in the Jack Benny radio program when a New York classical radio station in the late 1980's began broadcasting classic Jack Benny episodes every Sunday night. The Lucky Strike commercials were edited out, naturally, including the Sportsmen's songs....but even in edited form I fell in love with the show. That lead me to try and find full episodes of the radio program, and in time I obtained virtually all of the programs from the 1940's. And, as I tend to do, in my borderline OCD way, once I became such a fan I subsequently had to find out as much information on the show as possible. I ordered the great Jay Hickerson privately-published Jack Benny Show episode log, and after that I came into contact with the Museum of Broadcasting, the Library of Congress, and the Jack Benny personal papers collections at Wyoming and UCLA. Eventually I typed up all of this information (yes, this was pre-computer days~!) and I was going to have it privately published, in three separate volumes covering the program in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. That never came to fruition, and my plans to publish the information were put on the back-burner, until my wife Melissa had the great idea in late 2008 for me to put the information up for free on the Internet.

Since going online with this site in October 2008, I have been transferring all of my original typed information from 1989/1990, plus adding in a lot of information I didn't have room for back then, and also more recent research that I've done. There are still a lot of fans of Jack Benny, and hopefully all this information will be informative and helpful for current and future Benny fans~!

Bill Cairns,

July 2012